McCabe – 12-2017
Rybicki – 1-2018
Giaclone – 6-2018
Anderson, Toscas, Moffa – 8-2018
Sweeney – 9-2018
Moyer – 10-2018
Lynch – 12-2018
Noticing a trend while perusing these transcripts.
The familiar areas of inquiry are often met with carefully “crafted” answers.
Since the “activity” under scrutiny occurred 2015-2016-2017, these pukes have had plenty of time to “prepare.”
The transcripts have plenty of nuggets, but many answers seem well rehearsed.
If you don’t pick this poison fruit when it’s fresh….it rots.

I only read about 42 pages on Rybicki… A lot of “I’m not sure…” ” I dont’ recall…The most depressing thing is that they are NOT under OATH!? Why NOT? I agree that they had years to prepare….Hopefully, we can find what the truth is, and perjurers and framers, and those performing malicious prosecution, sedition and subversion of a campaign, A President, his family, and his administration will come to light, WITH justice ( PRISON TIME!) Eight criminal referrals, and according to Nunes , a few more maybe this week! We will see what Rosen, Barr, and the new guy investigating will do.. We may soon know who’s side they are on!!! I know Fratboy Wray is not on the side of civil liberties, Trump nor the Constitution(by his actions , he is known)!!! He was cya, with his last report nonsense ( FBI just needs a refresher/inservice on their policies…..), and his last statement on spying!! What a tool!

This is “VERY BAD NEWS” for former Obama AG Lorreta Lynch who denies instructing Comey to call MYE or the Clinton Email Investigation a “matter”. Liars always get caught.

INTERVIEW OF: JAMES RYBICKI Thursday, January 18, 2018

(pages 40-41)
Mr. Parmiter. You were in the meeting with the Director when he was told by Attorney General Lynch to call the Clinton email investigation a “matter.” Is that correct?

Mr. Rybicki. That’s correct.

(page 43)
Mr. Parmiter. In your experience as chief of staff, I imagine you have witnessed a lot of investigations proceed from the FBI. Are you aware of any other instances where the Attorney General or anyone else from DOJ directed the FBI to refer to an investigation as anything other than an investigation?

Mr. Rybicki. I’m not.

(page 116)
Chairman Gowdy. And that’s what I’m getting at. What could have called it into question?

Mr. Rybicki. The other factors that I mentioned. One we’ve discussed, which was the — call it a matter instead of an investigation.

The common thread that I note is that the democrats are positing their questions to defend the indefensible, regardless of how ridiculous or implausible it makes them look. This is what lockstep looks like.

I read a couple of these then skimmed a few more. Between the Midyear Exam stuff and the Dems fluffing the DOJ/FBI guys it just got really difficult to stick with it. I sorta view the Clinton email stuff as pointless at this point so I’m personally not interested in getting worked up over any undiscovered details. From anything related to ongoing issues these are the few points I found of note in the parts I read:

1. Apparently nobody who signs or works on a FISA warrant actually believes they are responsible for anything. The FISA court is a complete joke and these testimonies should be exhibit A for why it should be abolished tomorrow. The Woods procedures are apparently equally not worthy of accountability in the words of those who are responsible for them. We’ll see what the next round of testimony looks like but this round fingers are pointed at Jim Baker, Stu Evans, and Yates. Given Rosenstein’s testimony that his signature was irrelevant I’m predicting the circle of blame keeps going.

2. The FBI legal team was and is actively working to hide the Kavalec memos. They interrupted Ohr when he was on the verge of answering a pertinent question about them and also interrupted Trisha Anderson when she was going to answer one as well. The Anderson one was particularly of note because they used Mueller as the excuse. For the “stealth Rosenstein” crowd this is another blow to that theory.

3. I focused on anything I could find relating to the Kavalec memos as I figured that was the most important development discovered just prior to this release. Anderson’s testimony was somewhat interesting since she worked on the Page FISA yet did not realize Ohr had continuous contact with Steele. She apparently only found out about that when the House Republicans put it in their memo. So the Kavalec memos were definitely buried. Moyer testified that she found out about part of the info in the memos (the Steele bias) from a meeting with Ohr in late Nov 2016. I cross referenced this to Ohr’s testimony and he almost but never did admit that this info was available sooner. So apparently Ohr met with Kavalec on Nov 21 and then relayed that info to the FBI shortly thereafter. He is probably in the clear if that is the first he heard of it. The FBI played a ton of games with the HSCI to keep them in the dark about this though. They were not able to ask Ohr direct questions about this since they were not informed of the memos. The Ohr 302s should be interesting though to see if this info pops up earlier. I also find it very interesting that Stzrok’s comrade with the Flynn 302s (Pientka) is suddenly put in charge of collecting the Ohr 302s in Nov 2016.

4. More testimony confirming Rosenstein was serious about wiring the President and using the 25th amendment. All signs point to this being true. No one contradicts this (including Rosenstein if you parse his words). Funny his change in attitude occurs just as this is made public and he never gets called to testify under oath about this by the House Republicans who despised him. Hmmm…

5. Oddly enough I get the impression some/most of these people are not lying. They really believe they did a great job and did nothing wrong. That’s legitimately more scary and more depressing to me than believing they are all liars. The institutional rot at the DOJ/FBI is really deep.

I was focused on the Steele bias info since the Moyer testimony would make it seem that Ohr only conveys this information after his meeting or conversation with Kavalec. So it is not mentioned by name. From memory the question I’m referring to is in the bit when they were discussing the Ohr 302s. One question seemed to be leading to a definitive time for when that particular information was available but was cut off. I’d have to pull it up to find the exact quote but I’m on my phone right now.

So I missed this the first time but on p183 (bottom) she gets cut off from answering another FISA question and amusingly I think this one was from the Dem House staffer.

p198 is the specific question I’m referring to though. The question seems definitely related to Steele reliability information. It is an assumption that this would relate to the Kavalec memo material however. It follows their discussion of the Ohr 302s so that may be making me make a connection that isn’t there as there are other Steele reliability issues it could possibly be. She gets cut off though so no way to know what she was referring to exactly.

What I am mostly curious about is whether or not Ohr either received the Kavalec info prior to Nov 21 or independently reported Steele’s bias after a different meeting with Steele. He does testify that he thought he relayed that info in August or September which would be before Kavalec. No one asks direct questions that clear this up that I could find.

Hmmm, you are correct that “the FISA court is a complete joke”. This is a major fact revealed by the Trump spying scandal. The FISC has abandoned its Constitutional responsibility to protect the 4th Amendment. Because the “defendant” in this secret court has no representation, and because the proceeding is secret without the open press scrutiny that the Founders intended, the FISC court has an even heavier Constitutional burden and responsibility, which it has clearly failed. As soon as the FISC court suspected that misrepresentation, omission and fraud had been committed on the court, the DOJ/FBI should have been summoned by the court for discipline. The court has independent power to punish fraud, misrepresentation, etc with or without DOJ participation. The FISC court OFFICIALLY KNOWS that 85% of the spying has been illegal violation of the 4th Amendment. The fraudulent Page and other warrants should have been immediately withdrawn by the court, which is within its power, and responsibility.
Had the FISC court honestly carried out its responsibility, the Page (and other political spying ) warrants would never have been issued, much less extended. It is likely the court/issuing judge did not even read the false, fraudulent application, because there was no hearing, and no questions from the court despite the extreme measure of a political request to spy on a political campaign.
Easy questions the FISC court should have asked:
“What did you do to verify this pee pee dossier? Who paid for it? Why are you claiming carter page is a dangerous foreign spy, when he is a known FBI witness in a previous criminal case?
The FISC court should be the check-and-balance against a crooked or overreaching FBI/DOJ. Instead it is a secret Star Chamber, where the “fix was in” as they say in obama’s crooked chicago. The Star Chamber judges should be impeached and removed for “bad behavior” and failure of Constitutional responsibility.

Also, important questions the FISC court should have asked:
“Have you warned candidate Trump that General Flynn, Carter Page and George Papadopoulous are foreign spies? Why not?”
Your Steele ‘source’ claims that the russians have infiltrated the DNC – have you warned the DNC?”

From a video posted Sunday (interview of former mil intel guy)… once it became a counter-intel investigation– the FB¡ is under obligation to inform/brief an Am. Citizen if approached by a supposed foreign-agent. That includes the Trump Campaign, an entity that is seen as a “citizen” itself.

This presents a problem. The blatant violation of protocol, gives the impression that there was NO official counter-intel investigation. And they were actually spying/surveilling Am. citizens (George & Carter, etc.), while attempting to entrap them under the suspicion of being foreign agents… creating the need for one – retro-actively.

It’s also why they pushed the Trump’s a “Russian Agent” narrative so hard. Had it worked, it might’ve justified not informing him that 2-5 camp. associates were alleged “foreign agents”.

Yes, but do I misunderstand that the FISA warrants were instigated to find an after-the-fact reason for the illegality Mike Rogers found and put a stop to? The FISA push was for that, and to gin up some nefarious “Trump must be Russian Agent because Hillary must/should have succeeded in November 2016.

“Oddly enough I get the impression some/most of these people are not lying. They really believe they did a great job and did nothing wrong. That’s legitimately more scary and more depressing to me than believing they are all liars. The institutional rot at the DOJ/FBI is really deep.”

___________________________

I thought this at first….but it’s just good coaching. It falls apart when each and every one of these people (especially at the deputy director level) state that they can’t recall details about an investigation into a presidential candidate (either one). Were it a normal human being, you would recall each and every detail about this monumental undertaking that is, in fact historical and unprecedented. This is the pinnacle of their [profession…part of the highlight film. And, how many times in their testimony do you see…”well, it’s been 3 years, I don’t recall.”

Bull hockey. They had a directive…they followed it. They controlled the personnel to assure that outcome. Now they have to hide behind a thin tapestry of “we did the right thing” all the while tightroping over answers such that they appear to be cooperative, but not providing any sense of wrong doing. Moffa’s testimony is a great example. He goes out of his way to state that their was no political bias of favoritism in the investigation(s). But, every time Kim, or Baker ask him a question that would counter that position, he falls back on the “I don’t recall, it’s been 3 years.”

I frankly remain unconvinced that Hillary Clinton – or any other SOSUS – would actually put “hundreds of thousands” of emails onto a non-secure server. I’m fully aware of what has been said but I frankly just don’t believe that it’s true.

There is no credible reason for doing this, except to facilitate the information being “leaked by someone else,” and to pull “Russia™, of course” into the picture. Since the DNC wanted to conduct “counter-intelligence” spying against political opponents, the “Russia” and the “hacking” angles are needed.

Occam’s Razor tells me that the information was simply leaked by the DNC. The scenario doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Since these are classified data systems, it should be easy to chase these materials down and to discover exactly when they were created, changed, and/or accessed. We don’t have that kind of access, but someone does. (Even civilian-grade systems routinely provide this capability.)

But we should also not overlook the possibility that the data is a fabrication – that these are not authentic messages at all. The messages must simply be plausible.

Hillary did it to prevent her activities as SoState from being recorded as government records as required by law. She did not want her pay-to-play activities subject to FOIA or other scrutiny. Obama and otehrs did the same thing.

I’m reading the Trish testimony part about the Carter Page FISA right now.

First she says she didn’t read it, only the cover page that would have flagged issues for her, and then later she corrects and says she did not read it that day but had read it earlier.

These are slippery critters!

I was also dumbstruck by this Q&A on pg 206 (yes I’m almost through her PDF):

Q. And because he [Carter Page] is a U.S. person, is there any additional aspect that is required if you’re going up on a FISA on a U.S. person?
A. Not that I recall, but it does affect the frequency of the renewals that are required.

Call me crazy but I seem to remember Dan Bongino hammering the point that a FISA against a U.S. person does indeed require a lot of extra evidence – I think it requires evidence that the person is criminally involved with a non-U.S. person.

The Sweeney transcript seems inconsequential and, to me, is disappointing.

When his name first popped up months ago, he was portrayed as the guy who physically handled the Weiner laptop. He was the first lawman who laid eyes on what was on it. And he bumped it up the chain for action. I expected some real insights on the laptop.

Turns out Sweeney was the boss of the guy who actually looked at it. In fact, the guy who looked at it was so far down the chain that Sweeney didn’t even know his name. Sweeney knew next to nothing about how the laptop was analyzed. He seemed to be saying the the physical laptop was copied (“mirrored” the hard drive, I guess) and didn’t even know, for sure, where the laptop “mirror” ended up, saying he thinks it may have ended up at Quantico. Weiners original laptop, he speculates , was returned to Weiner. Which, if true, means that laptop is somewhere on the bottom of the Hudson River.

The agent who physically handled the “mirror” and saw what was on it is, to me, the guy they still need to talk to.

As far as the “mirror” at Quantico goes, I wonder if it if hasn’t been neutered, shall we say. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.

I wouldn’t summarize Sweeney interview as insignificant. I think he’s as “unimpressed” by the “lack of curiosity and subsequent action” taken by McCabe as we are. Further, he disagrees with Priestep’s assertion that a subpoena would take so long, in fact just the opposite.

And of course, he wouldn’t be the one to find Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop….that was discovered by a SAC tasked with sex crimes involving children.

I didn’t get the impression he definitively answered the “mirror image” was removed from their office(s). He said he thought they still had it, then backtracked he would have to check to make sure.

I did find it curious that NYFBI had worked with one Christopher Steele, as well as an “ongoing investigation” of The Clinton Foundation, which precluded his ability to answer certain questions.

This is an obvious, not–literally-fake “fact dispute” for superficial reporters and readers to grab onto. I do want to flag it for Treepers as a detail not to get overly excited about as an obivous “lie.”

My bigger point here relates to perjury traps so pls follow me a second. Whether Lynch “instructed” Comey to call MYE a “matter” comes down to two individuals’ *perceptions* — and even if a tape is produced where Lynch either distinctively tells Comey “call it a matter” or distinctively doesn’t say that — instead merely refers to it herself as a “matter” — it is realistically plausible that each person would have a different *recollection* of the exchange, or what was intended in the exchange, even minutes after. This is the nature of human communication. So even if we think this is patent BS, it’s not the sort of “fact dispute” that strong arguments or conclusions are based upon.

Take it as a contextual data point. Either may be lying; either may be mis-remembering; both are perceiving the exchange from their own particular vantage point. If we were investigators, we would consider the significance that either put on the use of particular language and examine how it “hangs together” with other relevant facts (e.g., in this example, Comey cites the exchange as a main reason he thought LL was possibly biased, so if his state of mind becomes important, we look at other factors weighing upon that question).

Point being, human perception/recollection of communication is fallible; of course investigators often are assessing sincerity and I’m not saying they shouldn’t. But you don’t hang a perjury charge on differing perceptions of an interaction, absent other evidence. (For example, if multiple people say LL instructed them the same thing, and LL denies it, starts to become more compelling …..).

The charge of “lying” applies all over this fiasco … but especially because the conspirators are over-using, and mis-using perjury-level “lying” it’s helpful going forward to employ more judicious use. IMHO. Please understand I’m not saying it’s “fake news” to point it out; just that, by itself, it’s not a terribly meaningful data point or incriminating discrepancy.

Whether Lynch said it, or one of the other conspirators– when you consider it alongside the well established, “MYE- Mid Year Exam” (title for their little project), it becomes clear the “Matter” label served a distinct purpose. And it was intended to differentiate it from an actual “investigation”– something that requires no other label to hide behind.

It further gives the impression that the so-called “Matter,” always had a pre-conceived outcome. Which I believe is more so the significance, vs. the he said/she said.

And none of them want the honor of being saddled with the directive (ie. “Call it a Matter”), that tainted & biased it from the start. As it was always a sham “investigation.”

I do like the fact that they have Moffa on record confirming that they did, indeed, review information that came directly from Glenn Simpson. He had to confer with his attorneys before making the admission. But, it’s now on record.